“This cape is giving me a rash.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson In Season 5’s Halloween special, the final segment is a vampire story. In Season 22’s Halloween special, the final segment is also a vampire story. Let’s take a look at them, shall we? The difference is apparent immediately. The Simpsons starts things off with the family quietly watching television, complete with the dogs playing poker painting in the background as a transition from the lead-in. The news report situates things firmly in the Springfield we’ve all come to know and love: the police are incompetent, Brockman is an idiot, Burns is evil. Everything necessary to set up the story has been established in one quick and joke filled scene. Zombie Simpsons begins with thirty seconds of dialogue free nothing that would be utterly irrelevant to anyone who hasn’t seen Twilight. That’s followed by a glacial setup full of painfully poor dialogue (“I should be scared, but I’m not.”) and repetitive jokes that, again, would be unfamiliar to anyone who hasn’t seen the source material. It’s not until two-and-a-half-minutes into a six-and-a-half-minute segment that one of the main characters is introduced, a warmed over vampire complete with cliched costume and accent. By contrast, two and a half minutes into “Bart Simpson’s Dracula”, the family has met Burns, dined with him, and the kids are off exploring his castle after Lisa, completely in character, figures out what’s really going on. It’s packed with jokes, some referencing Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Burns’ shadow is great) and others not (“Lisa, vampires are make believe, just like elves, gremlins and Eskimos”). It should also be noted that the fact that Season 5 is working with much stronger source material is no excuse for Season 22’s abject humor failure. If you want to make fun of Twilight, make fun of Twilight. There is no shortage of things that can be mocked: vampires that don’t drink blood, sparkle in the sun, and enjoy baseball. There are even fantastically sexy supernatural superhunks who inexplicably fall in love with a heroine that, to make her easily relatable for every member of the target demographic, has been deliberately excised of all personality. This sort of thing is a satirist’s wet dream and they don’t use any of it. Instead, they sketch up the world’s least imaginative vampire . . . and name him “Dracula”. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the culmination of hundreds of hours of work by the staff of Zombie Simpsons, as well as the first Google Image result for “Dracula Costume”: One of these is the work of cheap knockoff artists, the other is a costume. Then we get to the respective endings. The Simpsons takes the story back to the scene of the crime for its finale. We know where Burns’ hideout is, and the family is going back there to reclaim their son. Along the way the show never takes things seriously, tossing off jokes (a callback to the Super Fun Happy Slide,…
Tag: Treehouse of Horror XXI
Crazy Noises: Treehouse of Horror XXI
“And now, our parody of ‘Mad About You’, entitled ‘Mad About Shoe’! Gimme a kiss baby, no tongue, ha ha! . . . Ohh, you’re not going to like our ‘NYPD Shoe’ sketch. It’s pretty much the same thing.” – Krusty the Klown In our ongoing mission to bring you only the shallowest and laziest analysis of Zombie Simpsons, we’re keeping up our Crazy Noises series for Season 22. Since a podcast is so 2004, and video would require a flag, a fern and some folding chairs from the garage, we’ve elected to use the technology that brought the word “emoticon” to the masses: the chatroom. Star Trek image macros are strictly forbidden, unless you have a really good reason why Captain Picard is better than Captain Kirk. This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (surprisingly enough, not on “Jumanji”). This episode consisted of half assed Simpsonizations of four other shows/movies: The Office, Jumanji, Dead Calm, and Twilight. In the hands of people who cared in the least about jokes, pacing or comedy that wouldn’t be a problem. In the hands of Zombie Simpsons it was a disaster from start to finish, laden with tensionless action sequences, bizarre non sequiturs (even within single scenes), and enough limp, toothless pop culture “references” to fill one of those wretched spoof movies. Note: Dave couldn’t join us this week, so this is shorter and even less insightful than usual. Charlie Sweatpants: Shall we get started? Mad Jon: Ok then Do you remember a time when THOH weren’t just parodies of movies? Or when they were parodies, at least they were of things that were topical? Charlie Sweatpants: I don’t think any of this rose to the level of parody. Mad Jon: “Jumanji” was like 25 years ago. And “Twilight” is several years old as well. Charlie Sweatpants: Enh. That doesn’t bother me so much as the fact that they weren’t doing much to make fun of anything. Mad Jon: That is true. Most of the attempted jokes were 20-30 seconds of repetitive action Charlie Sweatpants: The board game titles were mildly clever, but then they spent the rest of the segment doing terrible – and terribly long and repetitive – physical "comedy". The joke where Wiggum got crushed would’ve been okay if it hadn’t gone on about five times longer than it should have. The chutes and ladders thing, I was actually embarrassed for them. Mad Jon: Like Homer’s walk, or Harry Potter/Edward’s stopping moving vehicles, which I assume was part of that movie which I never saw. Charlie Sweatpants: Yeah, the glorified goth kid stops a car from hitting the girl with no personality. The movie was terrible, but I watched it with weed and Rifftrax, so I had an okay time. Mad Jon: Sounds like fun. Charlie Sweatpants: But there was no need for it to keep happening like that. Though for sheer boredom the end of the segment was worse. The vampire neighborhood was just…
Even Vampires and Wizards and Wizard Vampires Cannot Save You
“We had a story to go with this painting, but it was far too intense, so we just threw something together with vampires. Enjoy.” – Bart Simpson Zombie Simpsons has a well deserved reputation for massively over-relying on physical comedy. When they’re completely out of ideas, which is often, they’ll just find ways to cause Homer and/or Bart a lot of pain. In this episode, Homer stuck his head into a flaming jack-o-lantern, was run over by a lawnmower, repeatedly fell down, was eaten by a shark, bitten by vampires, fell off a bell tower, and then hauled off by whatever that thing Milhouse was supposed to be. And that’s just Homer, when he wasn’t getting hurt, the odds were decent that someone else was. Even in a Halloween episode you’re supposed to do more than just beat the shit out of your characters. When that wasn’t happening, it was either string music of suspense or one of the usual Zombie Simpsons “parodies”, where they think drawing characters with big eyes and overbites is enough to qualify as satire. The opening with monsters in The Office style and the parade of vampires in the third segment spring immediately to mind. The numbers are in and while they’re not as bad as they could be, they’re still pretty bad. Last night, 8.20 million people waited patiently for the Twilight/Harry Potter part so they could finally turn this one off. That’s up from the most recent episode, but it’s also the lowest number for a Halloween special ever. That’s good news all around as the Treehouse of Horror episode is always one of (if not the) highest rated episodes of the year. Season 22 is almost certainly going to be the lowest rated season ever and, if these are the best numbers they can get with a guest star laden Halloween episode, might do so by a pretty big margin. [Note: Sorry there wasn’t a preview/open thread post yesterday. Three weeks off got us out of our routine.]